Why does U-M accept so few low-income students?

Kalli Hooper, left, and her mother, Kimberly Hooper, say selective schools like the University of Michigan should increase efforts to enroll more low-income students. (courtesy photo)

Kalli Hooper and Mark Schlissel have never met. As things stand, they likely never will.

Kalli is a 17-year-old high school senior with impressive college application numbers. She scored a 31 on her ACT, placing her in the top 2 percent of students in Michigan. She has a 3.8 grade point average at North Farmington High School, and is on the dean’s list at Oakland Community College, where she’s amassed 31 college credits while attending high school. She has seven varsity letters.

Schlissel is president of the University of Michigan, which has its own impressive set of numbers. It is the fourth-ranked public university in the country, as measured by U.S. News & World Report. It has the second-largest endowment among public universities, at more than $7.8 billion, allowing the school to offer generous financial aid to low-income students like Kalli.

But U-M has one number it’s probably not proud of: the smallest share of low-income students among Michigan’s public universities, and one of the lowest rates among public universities in the country. Schlissel says increasing diversity, including economic diversity, on the Ann Arbor campus is a priority.

Which brings us back to Kalli, who grew up in a family with an income under $30,000, with an Expected Family Contribution on federal college financial aid forms of less than $1,000 a year. She’s survived her parents’ divorce, their bouts of unemployment and a house lost to foreclosure.

Despite having an academic record well within the range of accepted students at U-M, Kalli was placed on a waiting list for admission. If past years are an indication, she isn’t likely to have a chance to enroll.

“Most of my friends with similar scores got in (to U-M),” Kalli said. “What more could I have done?”

The fate of Kalli’s U-M application represents the challenge faced by low-income students across the country trying to gain admission to elite colleges, and the simultaneous challenge faced by colleges struggling to add economic diversity to their campuses.

Low-income students, many of whom are also the first generation in their families to consider higher education, often do not have access to tutors and the kind of college navigation advice Bridge has noted is routinely available to wealthier students.

Meanwhile, highly-rated universities such as U-M and MSU struggle to find ways to get more qualified low-income students to apply while maintaining the academic standards on which their national rankings are partly based. And when low-income students like Kalli do apply, they are competing for spots with, in the case of U-M this year, 50,000 other hopefuls.

Michigan officials say the university’s acceptance rate is about the same for low-income applicants and higher-income applicants, and that the school attempts in its admissions process to give low-income and first-generation college students an edge.

But while income diversity is slowly improving on campus, the school still lags most public universities in the nation.

The need to diversify Michigan’s universities

Michigan’s low-income high school graduates enroll in college at lower levels than their wealthier, suburban peers. Those who do enroll are less likely to attend a four-year school, and more likely to drop out before earning a degree.

Closing that gap would provide an economic boost to Michigan, which currently ranks in the bottom half of states in adult college attainment. Michigan would need 287,328 more adults to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher just to reach the national average. Those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average 70 percent more than those with a high school diploma ($1,108 per week versus $651 per week, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Because middle- and upper-income students already enroll in college at high rates, Michigan’s best shot at increasing college attainment is to get more low-income students onto campus.

The most common way to gauge the percentage of low-income students on campus is by the number of Pell Grant recipients. The Pell Grant program offers financial aid (that doesn’t have to be paid back) to low-income students. About 75 percent of Pell recipients come from families earning $30,000 or less.

Low-income students at Michigan universities

This chart reveals the percentage of low-income students at each of Michigan’s public universities, and the average net price of attendance for students from families earning under $30,000 a year.

UNIVERSITY

% LOW INCOME*

NET COST UNDER $30K

Wayne State University

48

$10,544

UM Flint

45

$7,952

Eastern Michigan University

45

$10,938

UM Dearborn

43

$6,386

Lake Superior State University

42

$7,064

Saginaw Valley State University

41

$11,596

Ferris State University

41

$9,469

Western Michigan University

40

$13,575

Northern Michigan University

38

$8,984

Grand Valley State University

36

$11,159

Central Michigan University

35

10107

Michigan Technological University

27

$9,204

Michigan State University

24

$6,293

Oakland University

23

$7,311

UM Ann Arbor

17

$5,529

*Low income measure as percentage of students receiving Pell Grants

SOURCE: Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System

Eleven of Michigan’s 15 public universities enroll more Pell recipients than the national average of 33 percent. Almost half of Wayne State University students receive Pell Grants, for example, and 45 percent at Eastern Michigan University.

Conversely, at Michigan State University, 24 percent of students are low income; Oakland University, 23 percent.

At the University of Michigan, under 17 percent – about one in eight – students come from low-income families.

One reason for the low number of poor students on the Ann Arbor campus is that U-M is a highly selective university, with the middle 50 percent of its students earning ACT scores of 28 to 32 (the average ACT score in Michigan is 20.1).

Because test scores are correlated to a frustrating degree to income, the more selective a university is, the lower a share of lower-income students it tends to have.

For example, the three public universities with the highest student ACT scores (U-M, MSU and Michigan Tech) rank 1st, 3rd and 4th in lowest percentage of Pell Grant recipients among the state’s 15 four-year public universities.

The story is the same at high academic private universities. At Kalamazoo College, for example, 19 percent of students are low income; Hope College, 20 percent.

But even when compared with other elite public universities across the country, U-M lags in income diversity. Among the 25 highest-rated public universities in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report, U-M has the fourth-lowest share of low-income students on campus. At the top-rated public college, the University of California Berkeley, one of three students is low income, compared with one in eight at U-M.

In 2013, just 13 percent of incoming U-M freshmen hailing from Michigan came from families with incomes under $50,000, when three times that percentage of Michigan families earn under that figure. Nearly half (49 percent) of Michigan-resident freshmen came from families earning more than $150,000; three out of four freshmen from outside Michigan were from families above that income figure.

“It’s been a great concern of mine,” said Former U-M President James Duderstadt. “James Angell (U-M president from 1871 to 1909) said the university should provide ‘an uncommon education for the common man.’ Increasingly, if you look at the economic distribution of the students, it provides an uncommon education for the uncommonly rich.”

Attaining that diversity is more difficult today, after the Supreme Court upheld the state of Michigan’s ban on affirmative action in admission decisions. Since race was barred from being a consideration in admissions, U-M’s undergraduate enrollment of African-Americans has dropped to the lowest levels in decades. Last fall's freshmen class was 3.7 percent African-American; in the state as a whole, 14.3 percent of residents are African-American. The same policy that allowed race to be among a number of factors in admissions decisions also had the effect of increasing income diversity.

No prep course, but plenty of resilience

Kalli Hooper said she couldn’t make college visits before she applied because her family didn’t have a reliable car. She wanted to take a test prep course to prepare for the ACT, but her mother couldn’t afford the fee.

“They don’t realize the challenges that low-income students face,” said Kalli’s mother, Kimberly Hooper. “Any kid who is low income who has great test scores, that kid is resilient. That’s the kind of kid who is going to do well in college.”

A recent study whose main author is Michael Bastedo, director of the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at U-M, found that low-income students are increasingly concentrated in community colleges, which makes it less likely that they will earn a bachelor’s degree or higher, and presents greater challenges to their earning potential.

College admission offices in Michigan say they are very aware of income stratification on campus, and universities are trying to find ways to address it. “I don’t think they (colleges) have much of a choice” but to address it, said Lynn Blue, vice provost and dean of academic services and information technology at Grand Valley State University.

At Grand Valley, 36 percent of students are low-income. Admissions officers visit hundreds of schools a year, many in low-income and rural areas, tailoring their message to the audience.
“If it’s a low-income school, we’re going to talk about affordability,” Blue said. “They don’t want to know about the new library. They want to know how they could afford four years of college.

“It’s a social justice issue,” Blue said. “These are capable individuals who can contribute to society. If we’re not including those voices, we are losing so much. Ignoring them would be like throwing talent in the landfill.”

‘What’s our strategy?’

U-M is a major research university, so it’s not surprising that it has conducted research on the challenge of attracting more low-income students.

“If you fill out the application and are admitted, the percentage of low-income kids who graduate (from Michigan) is roughly the same as high-income kids,” said Al Franzblau, vice provost for business and academic affairs at U-M. “The big drop-off is in the applications submitted. We know there are lots of kids who come from, say, not the best high schools, who score in the range of Michigan, and we’re not seeing a lot of those applications. The trick is, how do you get those kids to apply?”

Other U-M research, still underway, found that there are, at the average Michigan high school, just three low-income students who qualify academically for U-M.

Even for a college as rich as the University of Michigan, it’s difficult to justify spending money to send admissions counselors to schools to try to find those three students, U-M officials say. “What’s our strategy?” Franzblau said. “How do we be efficient? We don’t have an infinite pool of dollars. We’re trying to think of what we can do to efficiently and effectively reach this audience.”

Low-income students, particularly those whose parents never attended college, often don’t realize that attending U-M can be as cheap as attending the local community college. “That message isn’t out there,” Franzblau said.

“We believe there are high-achieving, low-income kids in Michigan,” Franzblau said. “We do the best we can to find qualified students to bring in.”

So why did Kalli, with her high ACT and GPA and a boatload of college credits not gain admission?

The university’s admissions office knows a student’s family’s income range and whether the student’s parents attended college through questions on the Common Application, which U-M and many other schools around the country use. The school gives an edge in admissions decisions to students from low-income families and whose parents did not attend college, called "first generation students" in college parlance. “We consider those as positive factors in the holistic review for admission to U-M,” said U-M spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald.

Even with the university trying to increase income diversity, and with the school accepting about half of Michigan-resident applicants each year, Kalli was wait-listed. An email from a U-M admissions officer to Kalli, shared with Bridge by the Hooper family, said Kalli “has the capability to be a successful student at the University of Michigan,” but that “it was just so competitive this year that we did not have space to admit all the academically excellent students that applied.”

Continuing the cycle

Income diversity is creeping upward at U-M. The percentage of incoming freshmen from Michigan families earning less than $50,000 increased from 9 percent to 13 percent in the past decade.
Kalli likely won’t be going there. Michigan has taken very few aspiring Wolverines off their wait lists in recent years.

Kalli turned in a deposit to enroll at Michigan Tech, where she hopes to study business. She’s awaiting word on whether she’ll get an offer from U-M off the school’s wait list.

She says she’s fine either way. But she worries that other low-income, high-achieving students don’t have the options she had.

“If you keep low-income kids out of the best colleges,” Kalli said, “you’re just continuing the cycle of the wealthy kids going to the best schools and getting the best opportunities.”

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Comments

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Tue, 05/05/2015 - 7:36am

So why did Kalli, with her high ACT and GPA and a boatload of college credits not gain admission?
The university’s admissions office knows a student’s family’s income range and whether the student’s parents attended college through questions on the Common Application, which U-M and many other schools around the country use. “We consider those as positive factors in the holistic review for admission to U-M,” said U-M spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald.
Elitist? what ever gave you that idea? lol

You're not. She is still in high school and has taken AP courses and/or community college credit while enrolled in high school. Even with ample credits, she is a freshman, not a transfer student. If all those credits transfer, she will be above freshman standing, but that's not too uncommon, especially at a selective school that basically requires challenging AP courses on a transcript to get accepted.

Did you even read the article Dan? It would appear to be more that the University is "highly selective" than elitist. That said, the U of M has to do better than this. They can research it all they want, but they need to make changes. Why not call Berkley and see how they do it?

I applaud Bridge for highlighting this issue! I hope it will get the attention of U-M admission's folks. I hope there will be a follow up story to say that Kalli (and other low-income students) has indeed been admitted to U-m.

This is a complex problem. I recall that when my sister attended the U of M in the 1950s, tuition was $150/year. Even correcting for inflation, this was a bargain. The Michigan Legislature has been continually cutting support for higher education so that individual families are obliged to take on more and more costs. While Wayne State University does take the largest share of low-income students, it has been estimated that even with current levels of scholarship aid, 1/3 of undergraduate students can't afford to be in college.

It'll be politically difficult for the U of M to change admissions policies all that much. Parents from the wealthy suburbs likely feel that it's their public university, a place where we send our children to college (a sense of ownership and entitlement). In their view, children from working class families have their own public universities. Affordability is an issue--as the article points out, U of M is very expensive and working class families often see it as being unaffordable. Then, there's the incentive for U of M to admit qualified out of state applicants because they pay higher tuition. What's the proportion of out of state students at U of M and how has that changed over time? Still, U of M deserves credit for looking at the problem and trying to do something about it, even if there are a lot of constraints on what can be done.

The reason she was not admitted is not stated this article. All the words about lower income students not scoring high on ACT or not applying themselves to accademic rigors do not seem to apply to this girl, as she scored top 2% and pushed herself hard enough to have amassed a large number of credits already. Perhaps her skin, dare I say it, is just the wrong color to be taking up a diversity spot.

I am an admitted freshman for the Fall at UofM. I scored a 27 on my ACT, which is slightly below the average for Michigan and had a 3.8 GPA at a moderately sized high school; in short, nothing special. My parents make around 50k a year and I received a Pell Grant from the federal government, so in terms of this article, I am considered low-income. May I also mention that I was accepted early action, which is the admission period in which UofM claims to take the best of the best. I'm a white female, so I don't have much going for me on the diversity card either. I think the article fails to recognize the other factors that go into an admissions decision. I had tons of extra cirriculars, similar to the girl in the article, but I was a LEADER in all of them. What I have seen among my admitted peers is that UofM values leadership above anything else. The phrase "leaders and best" does not come from anywhere. Essays are also a crucial part of the process. You only get one shot to prove you are different from everyone else. If there is any reason she did not get in, it is not because she wasn't qualified or because she is low-income. My guess would be either the lack of a story or personal statement or lack of leadership.

Congrats on your acceptance, Sarah!
This article isn't about justifying why one student was not admitted. U-M does accept some low-income kids (such as you). The question is whether the percentage of Pell grant recipients they do admit is acceptable compared with other Michigan universities? Considering the number of (very wealthy) out-of-state applicants they admit, which in-state students are being pushed out to make room for them? Does the opportunity for acceptance decline with family income? It seems so.

Well, last year U-M accepted 6,225 kids into their freshman class. If U-M increased their percentage of low income kids to MSU's standards, that would be an additional 435 low-income kids admitted. So yes, it would make a difference.

My sister won the Stevens Award at Michigan State for the highest pre-med GPA, and was not accepted into U of M. My cousin, now a Maxilofacial Surgeon in Kalamazoo, could not get into Michigan, the #2 Dental School in the country, but was accepted into Northwestern, the #1 program. He paid tens of thousands more at Northwestern. The moral of the story: the University of Michigan will take less qualified out-of-state kids because the revenue is significantly higher for them. The revenue bump from out-of-state kids is huge. That's the system, and Michigan's deserving kids will always be stifled as a result. The story entirely misses this point...

I think that is the subtext of the article. But yes, you are correct.
UofM has basically dared the state to cut off funding so that it has an excuse to become private - it operates offices in Detroit that serve an indeterminable function other to pay lip service to being open to diversity ('Semester in the City', for you white kids from LA/Chicago/New York to take fun Instagram pictures over the summer!)
I love the University of Michigan, and have many wonderful memories from my time spent there as a student. As an alumnus, I make many visits throughout the year and support the new funding campaign. From 2004-2015, they've spent at least $2-2.5 billion on new academic facilities. But there are times when I feel that the school has been co-opted by an administrative class that is only interested in serving the largest donors. They really need to make an undergraduate education at UofM more affordable and open to lower income students.
Tear down Markley and make a larger dorm to accept more deserving students from Michigan. It's the right thing to do.

Kalli should be very proud of herself for being on the wait list. There were several kids at Campus Day this year saying they had not decided and that they had a hard decision to make. That said, she could still get in. According to Admissions, this year was the first time applications exceeded 51,000. They said it was their most competitive year yet. They cannot possibly accept everyone. Admissions is not an exact science at any school. I heard an admissions person say, "I can fill an entire class of straight A students but that would be one boring class." All kids who apply need to look at where they were accepted and have faith that the one they ultimately choose, is where they were meant to be.

From Ron's article: "Nearly half (49 percent) of Michigan-resident freshmen came from families earning more than $150,000; three out of four freshmen from outside Michigan were from families above that income figure."
Hard to understand why a class of straight A students would be "boring", but a class full of kids from families making more than 3x the median income in the state, is not.

Someone above must be looking out for Kalli! At Michigan Tech she will get an awesome education from internationally recognized professors instead of graduate teaching assistants like UofM. Perhaps she will be part of the APMP team and go to New York City and once again take first place in the nation over 140 other schools. She may decide to become part of the large Peace Corps family at Tech and (MTU #1 Master's International Campus) have her graduate degree paid for. Or maybe just join the 96% of graduates who leave with a job in hand. Who knows where her life choices may lead. I was accepted at UofM and declined and chose to attend MTU; never looked back. I feel my undergraduate degree at Tech was of an equal if not higher quality than that of my friends who attended UofM.
Every school has a limited number of places for freshmen - who were you going to turn away so that Kalli could go to UofM because she is poor (which makes a huge, undoubtedly wrong assumption that income was even considered). It makes no more sense than race. Neither should play any role in selection if your mission is to "educate the best and brightest in order to improve the status of the world's populations". Unfortunately, not everyone can go to school where they would like to for any number of reasons, but that does not prevent them from getting an excellent education from one of the myriad of good colleges and universities in Michigan.

Every highly-qualified low-income student in Michigan should have the same choice you did: To decline admission at UofM if they feel another school (Tech!) is a better choice for them. Who should be turned away from UofM to give them that choice? Every lesser qualified out-of-state student with more money.

Numerous factors come into play for getting into U-M or any other school. Back in the '90s, I applied in August, as soon as applications could be submitted to U-M, and learned that I was accepted in October. I had several similarly-qualified friends who waited longer to apply and were placed on the wait list (and were eventually accepted).

I was rejected from U of M with an ACT of 30 and 6 API tests taken - all a 3 or above, and one 5. My GPA was low because I had been homeless for about a year and a half during high school (moved between a couch and a motel during my freshman and sophomore years due to repeated family evictions), and I was rejected because, "that's not an impressive ACT score" when I tried to argue my case with admissions. All of the above was explained to them.
A university actually looking to uphold social justice would have said, "Oh, this guy is ambitious and smart and comes from the lowest of the lowest poor - we should give him a shot".

I LOVE BRIDGE NEWS! To finally get some TRUTH behind Michigan issues is sooo refreshing! I never rest on the information given to me from newspapers or newscasters or the usual "trusted authorities", but search for perspectives outside of the usual info-loop. It gives me the ability to make decisions with some "meat-on-the-bone" if you will. THANK YOU CENTER FOR MICHIGAN!

not true! as long as the poor/low income students can stuff a ball through a hoop or weigh 300 lbs and block or run a football they are welcome. how about the fact that they don't allow C students in. does the university think it's grads will never encounter C students in their lives? so much for diversity. as i have noted before all the out of state students who are taking spots from the children of the taxpayers should be kicked out. why do MI taxpayers have to subsidize the education of kids from other states and nations? I am still waiting for a good reason for that. if we allow out of state kids in our colleges why not send money to the publics schools of other states as well. maybe we in Michigan should help pay for Indiana's and Ohio's fire departments as well.

"The same policy that allowed race to be among a number of factors in admissions decisions also had the effect of increasing income diversity."
As this article pointed out, 1 out of every 3 Berkeley students is low-income, as judged by the number of students with Pell grants. Berkeley eliminated affirmative action nearly 2 decades ago, but this did NOT result in less income diversity. Even after affirmative action, Berkeley managed to admit a similar proportion of poor students from different backgrounds--without compromising its academic standards. In fact, last year the average SAT of admits was 2124 (1416 on a 1600 scale), and 32 on the ACT (I checked their undergraduate admissions website.)
So while U-M and Michigan State "struggle to find ways to get more qualified low-income students to apply while maintaining the academic standards," it seems like other state schools have figured out ways. It's up to Michigan's leaders to find out and perhaps implement some of these solutions.

It is not hard to figure out who is not getting the job done in improving enrollment of lower-income students at U-M. Admissions and Financial Aid both report to the provost. The inability to close this gap rests solely at the feet of Martha Pollack.
Pollack goes around telling student groups how she is going to address this issue, but then does nothing. Provost Pollack flips and then she flops, but above all she does not listen to us. I thought this was supposed to be a major competency of an effective provost.

Kalli needs to search for a Great Private University. With her outstanding academic credentials, she would definitely be admitted and most likely get significant academic scholarship money. She should consider Michigan's premier private Catholic institution, the University of Detroit Mercy.

I strongly suspect that if Kalli Hooper had graduated from Renaissance High School in Detroit instead of North Farmington, she would have been in the door at UM - Ann Arbor in a heartbeat. UM-AA has at least two problems as they struggle with Michigan's civil rights law and pressure to increase diversity from groups such as BAMN and the Federal Department of Education. From appearances (UM doesn't publish actual data) it seems that they are using low family income and high school location as proxies for race, and are concentrating their low-income admissions on people from school districts with very high proportions of African American students.

According to mischooldata.org, North Farmington's Senior student body is: 59.22% White, 21.36% African-American, 9.71% Asian, 8.41% Two or more races, 1.29% Hispanic. 17.15% economically disadvantaged.
Renaissance High School Seniors are 98.76% African-American. 40.25% economically disadvantaged.
Statewide averages for this year's senior class are: 72.05% White, 16.64% African-American, 5.34% Hispanic, 3.05% Asian, 2.08% Two or more races. 35.86% economically disadvantaged.
I would assume Admissions Counselors know these statistics before they begin making admission decisions and don't just rely on perceptions, but that could be a wrong assumption.

I currently attend the University of Michigan and it seems to me that every year someone who thinks they should have been accepted does not get in and complains. The truth is that they can't accept everyone. This girl may have had crappy personal essays that did not make her stand out from the other 51,000 applicants. And if you ask me they are right to try to to increase low income applications. I came from a school just outside of Detroit where almost everyone is below the poverty line and I think maybe 3 other people applied other than me. If they wanna change how many low income students there are they need to get more people to apply because I know a ton of people at my high school that could have went to this wonderful school. Now with that being said not everyone is gong to get in. It's just impossible. And the answer to that is not cutting admissions to out of state students, with UofM being one of the best universities in the world of course people from other states are going to want to come here. It's just not right to deny them the opportunity either

College admission is a ever changing environment. I agree with the comments that we need to look at the 'whole' student. A student is not just a ACT/SAT test score or a GPA, they are the total of their community service, volunteering, great essays that articulate who they are and what they are capable of, reference letters, and many other things that go into the mix!.Colleges try to do a good job of digging deep to see if the student fit is right and if the student will be successful at their school. It is not a easy process and the kids that don't get into the college of their dreams needs to have a back up plan.